but smile from the irony, even though you felt terrible for poor Sammy.
My grandmother was getting ready to tell fortunes from tea leaves; she always did this before her daughters washed her hair. She was vain about her psychic abilities, but she was even more vain about her hair, and she had reason to be. It was long and thick and silvery white, and she had it washed weekly in her kitchen sink and then combed and combed and combed by her team of daughters. When it was dry, it would be twisted into the complicated arrangement she wore—part braid, part bun, part French twist. It would last a week, and then the daughters would all come to wash it again—and to see each other and gab, too, of course. My mother was always close to all her sisters, and she always felt badly that she wasn’t able to produce one for me.
On that particular Saturday, my grandmother lifted the tablecloth and asked me if I would like my fortune read, too. I was honored, bumped my head hard on the way out from under the table, so eager was I to be included in this. I stood by her chair—it was the fifties kind of chair, I remember, red plastic Naugahyde with chrome trim and studs—and I had my fingers looped through the metal semicircle at the top of the chair and I was squeezing it because I was in love with Eric Underman and no one knew but me and I was scared my grandmother would say something about it and I was hopeful she’d say something about it and she did. She looked up at me and said, “Well! Your boyfriend likes you, too.”
There was a loud and immediate response from my aunties—a chorus of “Oh!”s and “Ah-ha!”s and I was mortified, but I was also proud. At last, I was moving into the circle of mysterious, scented womanhood. Soon I could sit at the table with them. I could swear. I had it planned, already. “That SOB,” I’d say.
But after my fortune was read, I went back under the table to dream about what I’d say to Eric the next time I saw him. I didn’t pay attention anymore to the low chatter that went on in the kitchen. Those exchanges that used to be as delicious to me as the scent of warm bread became suddenly mundane. The next Saturday, I didn’t go with my mother to wash her mother’s hair. I stayed home, hoping to run into Eric, and I did. We were both on bikes. I offered him a butterscotch LifeSaver, and he took it; and I wrote about that supercharged exchange in my white leather diary and then hid it in a new place.
Now I see myself so ready to be back in that kitchen, to take my grandmother’s heavy hair in my hands and whisper into her ear, “Why did you kick Grandpa out of the house?” She did kick him out for a while, for a period of a few months, when she was in her fifties. No one ever talked about why she did that, but I see myself asking her about it now, and I see her answering me. “Well,” she’d say. “I couldn’t leave, so he had to. Until I was through it.” Isn’t that possible? I think it is. She didn’t have the option of a trip away. So she created an artificial distance.
I stopped at a lemonade stand today. I never can pass one by. There was a little girl working it, maybe ten, long blonde ponytail, blue glasses. She had a lawn chair to sit in when business was slow, but when she saw me pulling over, she stood up professionally. “May I help you?” she asked, when I was too far away to answer without shouting. I held up a finger. When I got to the stand, I said, “Yes, I’d like a lemonade. How much is it?”
“Fifty cents,” she said.
I was disappointed. I thought it was too much. I thought it would have been cuter if it had been five or ten cents.
“Fifty cents, huh?” I said.
And she, unblinking, said, “Yes.”
I paid for the lemonade and she poured me some, then watched me drink it. “Want another one?” she asked, when I was done. I said oh no, that was plenty, that was just right. “What if I had some cookies out here,” she said. “Would you have bought one?”
I considered this.